Interview: Steven Wilson - Of Ravens, Revenants, and Creeping Things

Steven Wilson performs with his solo band in Belgium
on March 12, 2013. Photo by Tom Van Ghent

Tell us about bringing Guthrie
Govan aboard.
I didn’t know about the Aristocrats when
Marco came onboard and, admittedly,
that kind of fusion music is not my thing.
But I went to see them play and, watching
Guthrie, I just thought, “This guy could do
some amazing things for my music.” I knew
he could help me take my music to a much
higher level. Of course, the worry with guys
at that level is whether there’s enough to
keep them interested. I mean, I don’t like
shredding and I don’t like fast playing just
for the sake of it. I like guys who will play
one note that will break your heart, if that’s
the right thing to do. So the first thing
was to figure out if Guthrie was going to
be okay with that. And he absolutely was.
He’s a truly great musician—not because
he’s technically phenomenal—but because,
despite that, he always understands how to
play what is right for the song. There are
things on the record—like the title track, for instance—where he
only plays three notes. He
did exactly what I’d hoped
he would do, which is to
take the whole record to
another level.

In addition to blazing
solos, he plays quite a few
nice, melodic lines with a
lot of warm, jazzy tones.
Yes, we did a lot with that
“jazzy” guitar tone. We call
it the “Lonely Swede Lost
in the Forest” sound—a sort
of jazzy, warm, and dark
clean sound that’s mixed
with a mono plate reverb.
I love that sound—it’s on
many ’70s records, and it’s
especially noticeable on old
Scandinavian records. My
buddy Mikael Åkerfeldt
from Opeth uses that sound
quite a lot. The use of mono
plate reverb, in particular,
came from working on the
old King Crimson records
that I remixed. I learned from
working with Robert Fripp that a lot of the
time they kept the reverbs mono, and they
kept the reverb returns with the instrument. If
the flute was on the right, that’s exactly where
the reverb was, too. They didn’t do that very
’80s thing, where you take a guitar, keyboard,
or drum sound and put it through a massive
stereo reverb—wide-screen cinema!—and suddenly
you’ve lost all this space in your mix and
you wonder why there’s no space for anything
else. That mono reverb has a wonderful character
about it, an aura—almost a halo around
the sound.

You write such great chord changes—they’re often for rock songs—and Guthrie
is such a master of outlining chords using
chord tones and modal playing.
That’s something I really notice from old
records, ’70s records—musical phrases and
sections repeat, but they don’t completely
repeat, if you know what I mean. It’s one of
the malaises of modern music that sections
of songs and musical moments literally
repeat verbatim—like someone’s gone and
copied and pasted them. If you listen to
records from the ’70s, sure, they’re playing
riffs, but usually the guitarist is constantly
noodling around those riffs,
adding little colors, little textures. And it’s
something that comes, again, from the idea
of a band, in the studio, rehearsing and
writing together—playing live together in
the studio. So, in a way, the music is always
in a state of flux. Because of computer technology
and the way we tend to record in a
very piecemeal way these days, we tend to
edit the [expletive] out of things so that all
of those happy accidents where the guitar
player is noodling in the background just
behind the vocal—which is a lot of what
Guthrie was doing—are lost. I don’t hear
that on many modern records. In fact, I
don’t hear it on any modern records.

Guthrie Govan on Soaring with The Raven

Steven Wilson is still incredulous. “I mean, we’d gotten this LaRose Classic Jazz [Jazzmaster-style]
guitar with a Sustainiac sustainer circuit in the studio on the second day, and I asked Guthrie what
he thought of it,” Wilson recounts. “He picked the thing up and, literally, the first thing he played was
the solo on ‘Drive Home’—the solo that made the album. First time, first take. Isn’t that insane?”

Photo by Tom Van Ghent

Even crazier is that, during the solo—which Govan tracked live with the band—you can hear
the E-string popping out of the saddle, forcing Govan to play the rest of the solo without it.
“I later learned,” the Aristocrats chopsmaster explains, “that the Jazzmaster bridge/tailpiece
design is famously ill-equipped to deal with extravagant string bending!” While Govan thought
later versions of the solo sounded “a little more perfect,” the other players unanimously preferred the first take. “I suppose
the first one did have a certain vibe to it,” he shrugs, “presumably because I was still getting used to an utterly unfamiliar
instrument, which made me play a little differently. And, having played a lot with Marco in the Aristocrats, I think we had a
couple of spontaneous interactive moments during that solo which could have only happened in real time.”

As far as his approach to Wilson’s Raven sessions on the whole, Govan says, “Steven described the overall guitar vibe
he wanted for this album, and I just tried to serve the music as best I could, whilst remaining true to myself—but without
making any effort to leave a giant GG thumbprint all over the record.” Govan called on a small coterie of pedals, including
a Suhr Koko Boost, a Z.Vex Mastotron Fuzz, a DLS RotoSIM, and a TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb, and he typically recorded
time-domain effects live, per Wilson’s request. While darker textures and clean-toned lines do make up a significant
portion of Govan’s contribution, there are plenty of scorching, dramatic solos, too.

“I did try not to go too over the top with the frantic technical stuff, but a couple of ‘sheets of sound’ moments probably
slipped through the net anyhow,” he laughs. “I’ve gathered that there are some folks in the progressive rock community who
get turned off when a guitar player exceeds their chosen notes-per-second quota. But as I remember once observing to Steven,
these are often the same people who would be perfectly happy to hear a sax player playing at a comparable velocity. So I try
not to worry too much about those people!”

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